What kind of game do you want to play on the Mac?

>You collect javascript weapons.
Get the source for a JS parser and then build weapon attributes of the JS in a page.

Rooms are randomly generated 2D top down mazes (I know of a good random maze generation algorithm). Images are the bad guys. Links are teleporters to other rooms and stuff. Plus there are back and forward buttons and an address bar. The HTML parser would ignore CSS, SWFs, Java applets etc and concentrate on bare bone HTML.

Wouldn't this be, a bit obvious though? In particular, the pictures being the enemies? Surely it should be an interpretation? So, weak parts of the page, such as, small text, if this were a platformer, would make platforms that dissappear when you step on them...and bold text would provide structures which might spawn monsters, or transport the player to another part of the same level (what the bold text contains, ie. it's letters, would decide what it did, and how it did it, whilst its actual position on the page, would determine it's position in the level). It could work for a maze game too...I think having pictures wandering about killing people, and no offence, because its a perfectly plausable idea, would seem, well, a bit tacky, perhaps having the pictures distorted (picasso esque?) and the distortions determined by other factors...might work. Of course, this is all up to whoever is making the game, so I guess I should butt out.

What if the maze that was generated wasn't at all dependent on the tags, but the random seed was? This would make the whole thing not obvious in any way. Too bad there aren't any HTML parsers for METAL.

Can anyone who uses METAL tell me how to generate mazes that actually have outlets?

Slightly OT but I did notice Zool mentioned near the start of the thread.

As it happens it was a friend of mine who actually wrote Zool. I even had a large chunk of the souce code on my Amiga at one time. What was even spookier was that the day after seeing Zool mentioned here I heard he had just returned to the UK.

To bring this back OT, I think a game like Zool would be great. In this age of fancy 3D, 4D or whatever games, I think there is still a place for the kind of games from our youth. Just because something does not use the latest technology does not make it bad. After all people still read books

You have to look at it this way though: if you are going to just randomly seed it based on the HTML, what is the point? The player would see no corelation. You might as well just make a game that is not related to web sites at all. Something about each room/level has to be similar to the actual page in a recognizable way, and there has to be a real purpose for traveling through the Web.

Quote:Originally posted by geezusfreeek You have to look at it this way though: if you are going to just randomly seed it based on the HTML, what is the point? The player would see no corelation. You might as well just make a game that is not related to web sites at all. Something about each room/level has to be similar to the actual page in a recognizable way, and there has to be a real purpose for traveling through the Web.

I just think making the enemies the pictures on the pages wouldn't be too hot. If this were a multiplayer game then you have more than enough reason to go through various pages (ie. so you can actually score more points than your opponents)...I'm not sure if this could work as a single-player game, because there may be no motivation for playing.

Easy ways of making it look similiar to a web page are, taking the web page's colour scheme. Where things appear on the web page...they appear on the level, I go back to my thing on bold text, or as another example, text fields, where the user enters text, on the level, they could be places where the player changes the game world...such as a button which makes certain platforms appear and others dissappear. Perhaps put thbe biggest picture on the web-page as a part of the background, I said a part of, so it might be semi-transparent and merge with the rest of the background, if that makes any sense. Keeping with my idea of a platformer multi-player thing (because I like it, well, I'm bound to like it aren't I? Otherwise I wouldn't have thought of it...) you'll need a way of makiong actual platforms...I think this would be the trickiest, just look at the idevgames site, what can you see? An orange rectangle at the top, that could be a platform, but it clearly couldn't be positioned there on the level, some sort of AI would have to be created to make sure things went in good places. I think maybe a warping effect would be nice, giving the idea that these web pages have been transformed and are now in a new dimension or something like that. For instance, the orange bar at the top could be melted and freeze framed whilst melting (like in that photoshop plug-in, eyecandy, the melting effect), so you'd still have some on the top, but you'd also have drops of orange for players to jump on (they'd almost act like steps) and of course more orange platforms below it formed as huge parts of the orange bar have melted off together. I hope I'm making sense...sorry, as you can tell, I'm rather passionate about this idea. There could be other effects, such as bars at the bottom of the page being burnt, forming smoke, if that makes any sense. and of course then blocks of text between the two bars could be made into more platforms. (and other elements such as enemies would be formed by say, big, bold, text).

Sorry, I do go on, I've realised I've ended up discussing it with myself...I must look a bit silly. K, sorry bout the crappy ideas.

Quote:Originally posted by geezusfreeek You have to look at it this way though: if you are going to just randomly seed it based on the HTML, what is the point? The player would see no corelation. You might as well just make a game that is not related to web sites at all. Something about each room/level has to be similar to the actual page in a recognizable way, and there has to be a real purpose for traveling through the Web.

I really doubt the barcode monster game had any strong relationship between the monsters it created and the barcodes that were scanned.

Quote:Originally posted by Mark Levin I really doubt the barcode monster game had any strong relationship between the monsters it created and the barcodes that were scanned.

"I choose you, Applejuicemon!"

Well, that was what was so cool, it really seemed it had. Every scan of the same barcode gave you the same thing, and it seemed very much like it had something to do with the barcode. That's why my brothers and I started on trying to make the ultimate weapn, character and armour by making a program that printed barcodes for us We did succed in making a really great weapon, but we used the milkpackages as a base.

"Gameplay Uber Alles. And if you can make it psychedelic too, great!" - Jeff Minter

Quote:Originally posted by diordna What if the maze that was generated wasn't at all dependent on the tags, but the random seed was? This would make the whole thing not obvious in any way. Too bad there aren't any HTML parsers for METAL.

Can anyone who uses METAL tell me how to generate mazes that actually have outlets?

NO WAY CAN THIS BE DONE IN METAL IF THERE IS MULTIPLAYER AND SERVER TO CLIENT COMMUNICATION!!!

For this, I recommend C++, Java, or something along those lines. Actually I'd recommend Cocoa/Objective-C.

Plus metal can't load URL resources, so Metal is out of the question (I wasn't even thinking along the lines of metal.

The CoreFoundation framework includes an XML parser which (with some work) could be used to parse XML. On top of that, Java also has an XML parser. Anyway, I personally can't stand Metal.

For the love of God not cocoa ...this is a game which could possibly be fun and possibly run on oldish machines...so why only make it for more modern machines running OSX?...yeah...I just wannah be able to play it...if it is to be made .

add if there's time or after the contest:
a few more powerful ships. large dots. spawn the smaller fighters and command them. if the mother ship is destroyed the smaller ships don't act as coordinated.

Sorry, just came up with something else I'd like to see. For ages I've been longing to play elite on my mac (EV just isn't the same), perhaps it would be possible to make a clone in three months time? I'm not talking up-to-the-date graphics, unless of course an artist and a programmer worked together. And because the elite universe was randomly generated (from a seed that was the same for every game, so not actually random) there wouldn't be any time wasted on making it big...the game would be purely about good physics, I'd just love to see that docking method again. Does anyone know how plausable this would be?